Most healthcare practices rely on scheduled appointments to provide an agreed time and place to serve patients. In many cases, after serving a patient, a return appointment will be recommended for some time in the future. Often, an appointment is made for a return visit before the patient leaves the office. However, if the needed appointment is too far in the future, if staff schedules are unreliable, or if a suitable appointment cannot be found quickly, then the office may choose instead to use a recall. A recall is a notice, sent to the patient prior to the desired appointment date, reminding the patient to call to schedule an appointment.
Many management systems that schedule patient appointments provide support for recall notices. Typically, these systems allow entry of a record consisting of the patient, the target date for the unscheduled appointment, and some notes about the reason for the recall. On a regular basis, the management system is used to generate printed cards, letters, or address labels, so that reminders to call for an appointment can be sent to the appropriate patients. Instead of printed reminders, automated calling systems are sometimes used to leave a recorded message requesting a return call to schedule an appointment.
Unfortunately, many patients fail to respond to recall notices. Consequently, they don't receive the care they need. Practice management systems often provide a list of patients who have not responded to recall notices, so that these patients can be contacted or reminded again. However, these simple lists of unresponsive patients are inadequate for practices that are determined to continue calling until they reach each patient and are either able to schedule an appointment or learn that the patient is unable or unwilling to return for needed care. These practices need to ensure that additional contact attempts are not made until a sufficient time has elapsed to warrant another contact. Further, callers require that as patients are contacted and appointments are scheduled or refused, those patients are deleted from the list so that they are not contacted again.
Another disadvantage of prior art systems is that they provide no guidance on how to use multiple phone numbers when more than one number is available. As a result, a user might not try a second number when appropriate, resulting in a missed opportunity to contact a patient. In cases where the user decides to try two numbers and gets two distinct call results, she is left to herself to decide which call result to record. This can cause the system to place the patient back on the call list either too soon or too late. If too soon, the unnecessary call may generate bad will with the patient. If too late, needed care may be delayed.
Multiple patients often reside at the same household. By contacting one patient at a time, the same household may receive multiple calls from the same organization when one call would have sufficed. This results in bad will with the patient, and a lower average number of appointments made per call, or call yield, thus impacting efficiency and productivity.
Thus, the health care industry needs a system which provides better support for calling overdue patients with multiple phone numbers, as well as households with multiple patients, in order to increase call yields and improve patient satisfaction by properly spacing and eliminating redundant calls.